Download Flash Video. This site makes it easy to download all of the You Tube, Google Video and iFilm content that has been appearing on the front page. Ideal if you can't view them at work and your home connection is arthritic. Similiar functionality can be provided for Google and You Tube by a greasemonky script. The downloaded file is in .FLV format which can be viewed with VLC or FLV Player. .FLV can be converted to other formats with TVC once you have it on your system.posted by Mitheral (18 comments total)
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Perfect! I was just wondering how to get YouTube vids onto my compi. Thanks millions.posted by zonkout at 12:22 PM on March 8, 2006

Add one more huge "thank you" to the list, OP.posted by Amanojaku at 4:54 PM on March 8, 2006

As of two days ago, I couldnt get those greasemonkey scripts to work, are they still broken?posted by ernie at 5:16 PM on March 8, 2006

Yes, I thank you too. This is a fantastic tool that's going to be one of my most frequently used favorites.

However, many of these websites have a distinct and glaring absence of any easy and obvious way to save videos. They disable right-click save-target, they put URLs to the file through two or three layers of files, they encrypt the file names, they take any saving options out of the players ... I think we can safely assume that, for reasons that seem good to them, the video providers want to keep people from being able to play videos without visiting their not-accessible-offline, ad-jammed, often stuttering and slow website. So they'll fight it, block it, blacklist it, and come up with new negative buzzwords like "hotlinking" (which describes what the internet was once considered to be for - bandwith distribution).

What is really needed, the killer app of the analogue hole, is a program to record the video and sound from the local PC, output some obvious and simple format, and make it easy to edit the output to compensate for framerate delays.posted by aeschenkarnos at 5:22 PM on March 8, 2006

erniewrites"I couldnt get those greasemonkey scripts to work, are they still broken?"

The YouTube one work for me ten minutes before I posted this. I didn't test the google variant.posted by Mitheral at 5:42 PM on March 8, 2006

Damn! I was just about to post this. I found it last week. It works very well.posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:55 AM on March 9, 2006

I should say though that the FLV player was, at least for me, total garbage, and also you should be careful re-encoding your movies; starting with a low bitrate already (streaming video) and re-encoding it with a new codec can make it pretty ugly. I'm keeping all mine as their original things.posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:56 AM on March 9, 2006

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